A measure of poverty tracked by the Census Bureau rose in 2022, as COVID era benefits expired and average income fell, according to a Tuesday report.

Why it matters: Child poverty saw a sharp increase in 2022 following a record low the year prior.

Driving the news: While the official poverty rate (considered an outdated measure) didn't see a significant change from 2021 to 2022, the supplemental poverty measure (SPM), which takes government aid into account, saw a sharp increase.

American households' income fell last year as their cost of living jumped higher than it has in over four decades amid soaring inflation and marking the third straight annual decline since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The federal agency reported Tuesday that U.S. real median household income fell by 2.3% to $74,580 in 2022, down from $76,330 in 2021, noting that inflation rose 7.8%, which is the largest annual increase in the cost-of-living adjustment since 1981.

President Joe Biden’s war on poverty is unraveling fast.

Just two years after orchestrating the largest expansion of the U.S. safety net in a half-century, Biden’s $2 trillion bet that big-government policies could vastly improve life for the poorest Americans is coming to a close.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed slammed the "homeless coalition" after a court blocked the city's ability to clear homeless encampments.

Breed made the remarks outside the United States 9th Circuit Court of Appeals as a large crowd urged it to cancel a court order to bar the clearing of homeless encampments in the city, Fox News reported . The mayor of the city, which suffers from a significant homelessness crisis, extolled the city's efforts to assist the homeless, but she said that the "homeless coalition" is holding the city "hostage."

At times, the California Legislature is reminiscent of a high-school student council, except that instead of working with few-hundred-dollar activities budget lawmakers are spending more than $300 billion in revenues. I'm not the first commentator to notice that politicians often promise things they can't possibly provide—and are no more realistic than a student body president offering free pizza on Fridays.

In 1976, Binan Tuku ventured to meet a Brazilian government’s expedition on the banks of the Itui River in a remote area of the western Amazon rainforest. After some initial suspicion, he and his father accepted machetes and soap in what was the beginning of the Matis tribe’s contact with the non-Indigenous world.

Every two weeks, cars line up at The Hill Church in Vallejo for a drive-thru food distribution. While Whitney Houston songs play over a speaker, volunteers load 39 pounds of food into each trunk — canned tuna, eggs, potatoes and other staples. 

Elvira Santiago, a retired medical assistant living in senior housing, is particularly excited about the bag of apples. 

Millions of people are leaving their homes across Latin America in numbers not seen in decades, many of them pressing toward the United States.

While migration to the U.S. southern border has always fluctuated, the pandemic and the recession that followed hit Latin America harder than almost anywhere else in the world, plunging millions into hunger, destitution and despair.

On Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the host argued with his guest Daniel Bessner about race, crime, and poverty. Bessner is an International Studies professor at the University of Washington and a Contributing Editor at the socialist magazine Jacobin. (Full disclosure: He’s also a friend and occasional collaborator of mine.)

Earth Day is Saturday! Hooray?

"Saving humanity from the climate crisis," says EarthDay.org, requires us to "push away from the dirty fossil fuel economy."

Sounds logical.

But my latest video explains why doing that is cruel to poor people.